Category Archives: Sliver of Something Better

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Odd Trips Inward

Love and relationships have been on my mind a lot lately. I think it is mostly because of the time of year and that so many women I know are pregnant. I have been kicking things around in my head for awhile now, so, of course, I am going to over share about them here.

The most surprising realization I have had was: all you need to get love and acceptance is be willing to love and accept. Simple. Not everyone will love you, and not everyone will accept you, but people will care about you and want to be in your life.

Every living human being wants love and acceptance. It gets all mucked up in how we handle that desire, but once you realize you are worthy of love and acceptance and you decide you will love people in your life, flaws and all, then you will find it.

Some people will never accept you or love you, but you can’t help that. I used to try so hard to change myself to be more acceptable to people in my life, but I always came up short, and I was never going to be good enough. Somewhere, I don’t know where, I found people who I didn’t need to pretend with.

This is who I am. I am deeply flawed, weird, crazy, fat, socially awkward, and I will almost always, without fail, say the wrong thing at the wrong time. I am also funny, loyal, smart, honest, loving, and I find joy in making people I care about happy. If you love me and accept me, I will love you and accept you, almost without exception. (Okay, I do have an issue with people who are intentionally mean, hurtful, rude, or abusive. Aside from that, though, almost without exception.)

I am worthy of love and friendship.

I am also still deeply damaged and I am trying to figure it out how to fix me.

I don’t understand how I can see how worthy I am of friendship, but I still really don’t feel worthy of romantic love. Part of me cannot believe that someday someone fantastic will love me like I see in so many couples around me.

I believe in deep, lasting love. I have seen so much of it in my life. I believe some people are meant to be together for the rest of their lives, if they are willing to put the work into it.  I believe men can fall so madly in love with a woman that they form a pair bond so tight that are no longer whole without that other person. I just have a hard time believing that someone will fall for me like that.

Random interruption from a baby corgi

There is a reason I get into the relationships I do and why I let men I have romantic interest treat me the way I do. It is my self worth issues. I know this. I could blame it on a million things, from modern media, human nature, or being told at thirteen that I am not the type of person someone will want to sleep with because of my looks, but the truth is the reason isn’t important.

I need to look honestly at the broken parts. I need to poke at them and try to heal them. I need to admit things that people who care about me know. I have serious self-worth issues that I need to work on before I can be happy with someone else.  It would be fantastic if some man could swoop in and fix me, but I am done waiting for someone else. I have to figure out how to fix me, no one else can.

I have to finish my book for my own self worth. I need to realize all of those flaws I see are not greater than the good things about me. I have to  ask for what I want and to hold out for what I need.  I need to  learn that I could lose weight, publish books, become famous, learn social graces, but it will never be enough if I can’t accept that anyone would be lucky to have my love. I need to think I am good enough if I ever want a man to treat me like I am good enough. Otherwise, I will always need to be skinner, funnier, more successful, just different than what I am.

I need to make those crazy lady post it notes:

I am deeply flawed and broken, but I am beautiful.

I deserve to be loved like I love.

Anything else is a bunch of bullshit.

 
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Smash (Turns Out)

First, watch this. It is twenty minutes long but it is an amazing twenty minutes. Trust me

I know most of you did not stop and watch it. Oh ye of little faith. Just know that this will inspire a few blogs after this one.

Saturday I reconnected with an amazing woman that had been an astounding friend for many years with. (We just went a really long time between phone calls.) She linked me this and it made me think. Thinking gave me panic attacks and yesterday everything went smash.

I felt like I had done some crazy Wiley Coyote stunt where I attached myself to a bungee cord attached to a brick wall and turned on my jet pack and eventually the bungee cord and the brink wall won. BOOM.

I am Selina, Handler of Things. When there is a problem I handle it. I sit down and look at my options and figure out a plan of attack. When I am struggling I come up with multiple plans and go through them one by one caring little about actual success just caring about keeping moving. I do this with the people I care about too. It is why I seem bossy or controlling, it is because I am trying to handle things because I want to make things as good as possible for those I love. It is just what I do.

Turns out you can’t just handle heartbreak.

Selina, Handler of Things met her match with this one.

This is how I explained it to my mom after the cord smashed me back into the wall and I realized I was hurting: I am only three blocks of better trying to run fast and be one mile of better. Eventually something is going to happen and snap you back and wake you up. I was working so hard to push push push push things to make them better, to make them move, that I lost track of were I was and stopped being honest to myself. I was so busy trying to be okay that I forgot to actually help myself be okay.

Turns out that doesn’t work so well.

It also turns out that I have to be okay with that. My tendency when bad things happen to me is to downplay them. It was just a stupid break up. He was not right for me, everyone knew (including me.) He was a big bag of jerk and I am free of him. I deserve better anyway. He was holding me back an now I can be and do whatever I want.

The life I had built for that year plus died. That Selina that I was died. I gave that relationship everything I had and I went into it with my whole heart. It causes damage.

I honestly do not miss him. I see my life as better with out him. In my mind, I know I deserve better. I thought this meant the damage should be better and I should be able to move on. Yeah, so maybe I was a little wrong there. The damage is still there and it still hurts. Turns out making plans and handling things do not work on feelings of being unworthy of love and of feelings weakness. Turns out that planning and handling just hides them.

Push push push. It pisses me off so bad. I want to be better and I should be better but I am not. I should have a job. I should have plans. I should be skinner. I should be writing my great whatever the hell it is that I am going to write to change the world. I should be out making a bevy of new friends. I should, I should, I should.

I was doing the ugly cry (the one with the red face and snot) while talking to my mom and I realized I have a massive double standard for myself. If I saw someone else going through this I would say I was doing fine. I would give them far more leeway than I give myself. I would tell them they are trying hard and that these things take time. I would tell them to stop worrying about should. I would tell them that after a crash it is okay to take a few days and hide and heal. I would tell them that sometimes in life merely doing what you can is enough. Turns out I am kinder to others than I am myself.

I am hurting. I have no plans to handle it. I am just going to feel it. I am going to take a few days to hide and heal. I am going to try to be more honest with myself and try to be kinder to myself. I am going to write what I feel and not what I think I should. Beyond that, I don’t know.

 
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If There Ever Was

I got a Facebook message today from I woman I had been friends with in World of Warcraft until some guild drama ended our friendship. It really got me thinking about that period in my life.

awesome worgen image I stopped playing WoW about two months ago. I do not miss it.

God has it really only been two months? It feels like my life fell apart ages ago and I have been scrambling to put it back together while being emo and moody for far longer than that.  I might not being too bad for two months out.

Anyway, I stopped playing WoW and there is not a part of me that misses it.  I miss some of the people. I miss the feeling of community I had since I haven’t really formed bonds in Rift. I do not miss the overwhelming spot I let WoW have in my life.

I am not one of those reformed WoWheads that believe it is evil and will destroy your life if you play it. I believe it is addictive and that it is very easy to lose perspective when you play, but I feel like that is true for many many things. I think it is also true that if you lose balance and let WoW take over your life then it is most likely because something was wrong in your life.

My biggest issue with the game was that I always invested far too much emotionally into it. I allowed myself to get wrapped up in the drama that is inherent with 12 million emo gamers doing anything. My very nature is to be social and to care about people. I forgot to draw the line between caring about my other gamers who are real and do matter and the game which means nothing. I also became very comfortable allowing World of Warcraft to fill some very important roles in my life.

I need social interaction. I need friends. When I moved back here, I felt my lack of friends painfully and distinctly. I could get that big group social dynamic from the game really easily. This is the thing non-gamers don’t understand and it is very important to try to wrap your brain around, the relationships you form with other players are real. We do form relationships with genuine emotion in them. “Normal” people have a hard time understanding that since people have a tendency to put such emphasis on face to face interaction. MMOs are a bonding experience for gamers. We have a big community of people like us. We are a subculture that crosses most socio-economic barriers and most of us delight in this world of people like us.

I don’t apologize for using WoW to make friends and get a social group. I don’t even actually regret it. Now, though, with two months out of it, I miss my “real life” friends more than ever. My regret is that I lost some motivation to hang out with friends I have had for years because I had a readily accessible social core just by turning on my computer. I write blog entries and get responses from Renee, Jill, Lynsie, and Amanda and I realize just how much I miss these women. I may be the fifth wheel when I hang out with the Kreigers and the Hagans but I miss it. It is my own fault too. When I was WoWing all the time, I started to feel awkward around groups of friends and I thought it was the WoW, now I realize that it is me. I have always been awkward and I need to not let that worry stop me.

I also let WoW fulfill my need for a sense of accomplishment. I have a strange sense of self-worth. In order to be happy I have to feel like I am doing something with my life. When my WoW was at it’s most insane, I was not in school and if I did have a job, it was a half time job with no chances of advancement. My self esteem was low because I felt like I was wasting my life away. That wasn’t World of Warcraft’s fault, it was mine.

I don’t know that I have any conclusions yet. I don’t feel like I wasted years of my life. I don’t have regrets because I feel like there are lessons in there, I just have to be willing to look for them. Every small thing in my life has led me to this point. World of Warcraft was one of those things. Things may hurt, things may be hard, and I still have moments of intense melancholy but feel like I am where I need to be in my life. I feel like once I get through this there will be something wonderful, even if it is just a lot more knowledge. I need to think some more.

 
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The Problem with Monsters

Sunday I cut all ties with my ex. I can still e-mail him but there is no way to erase the email address from my mind. He could e-mail me or leave comments on the site if he wanted to but I have done all that I know to do to move on. It sucks. It is painful. It is lonely. I will live through it.

The Problem with Monsters

Truth is I still love him. I have a feeling I will always love him. In some ways, he was a great guy. We had some really great times. When things were good, it was the happiest I had ever been in my life. He was smart, funny, sexy, and very good at World of Warcraft. He was also emotionally abusive.

The problem is that he was not a monster. He was confused and emotionally damaged. I felt him working very hard to overcome and become a better person and that is why I stayed. I saw so much good in him. I had hope that if I loved him enough and just hung in there, things would be okay.  I was pretty dumb about that. (Did I drink that kool-aid?)

I think that is the problem most people in emotionally abusive relationships face. The abusers are not some monsters with dripping fangs or we don’t have to cover bruises or make lame excuses during hospital trips. We have to make smaller, more subtle excuses. Most of them, we only have to make to ourselves.  After awhile we become really good at these excuses and they automatically spring to our minds and we don’t even notice we are making them.

One of my friends and my role model for internet goddess Sara O’Flaherty said:

It’s easy to make excuses for people we love, and as it starts to hurt less we tend to not think it was as bad. Sometimes you have to take that shard of glass and dig it back in the wound to remind yourself how utterly awful it was.

When it began I knew it was abuse. I thought I was strong enough to face it. Somewhere in the middle of all of it I forgot to face it and just took it. I had my reasons. By the time he broke up with me, I was so confused I didn’t know to be outraged. I had lost track of how I was supposed to be treated. I had gotten so wrapped up in forgiving him and loving him, I had forgotten about me.

I hate admitting this, it is part of the shame, but I only knew something was wrong by the reactions of my friends. I feel like I should have come out of it mad and outraged. I am still ashamed at my lack of indigence.  It should not have taken Tina’s rage, Sara’s swearing and name calling, and Lanell holding my handing telling me “honey, he abused you, you were abused,” to make me see things were desperately wrong.  I am even more ashamed that I made excuses for it in the beginning. Truth is that the shame isn’t helpful. Truth is that I went through what way too many women (and men) go through.

Now all I can do is try to look back at what happened and examine it without the excuses and the shame.

It is hard to know when it all began. He had been tempestuous before we even got together. I didn’t know enough to see that as a warning sign. He very obviously loved me, even in the beginning.  In the beginning, he would tell me how smart, beautiful, and talented I was. I was like a flower growing in summer sunlight. I liked the me I was with him in the beginning.

He had a temper even then and I was afraid of it even then. In the beginning, though, he always knew when he overstepped. So many times in the relationship, I would be on the brink of leaving and he would do something that kept me there. Everyone seemed to noticed that he had a sixth sense of right when he was about to push me too far. I still remember things being good most of the time. I have no idea if I was wrong or not.

Then the big bad happened. I called it “the rough patch.” That is like calling Mel Gibson a little unbalanced. I think this is when the excuses started to flow like spice on Dune. I understood why he acted the way he did. I think I forgot that understand why someone is acting they do is not the same as it being okay. I know I knew there were things that were not okay but I was going to wait for things to calm down to talk about them. Things never really got good after that. I was stubborn and I loved him so I kept pushing.

I am coming to realize that the details don’t really matter except to help remind me of how things that happened where not okay. I know how a man is supposed to treat a woman. I know how a woman is supposed to treat a man. I know I wasn’t being treated like that. It is so damned hard to admit that I have issues believing I can be treated well and loved and cherished. I see men bending over backwards for the women they love. I was raised by a good man. I am surrounded by good men. I know what they are supposed to be like. My self esteem is so low that I have a hard time believing I will ever be treated like that. It is a hard truth to face. Strong woman is screaming.

There is just so much. One thing leads to another to another. I get lost in it in my head. I don’t really know how to best handle it all. I do think it is best to take Sara’s advice and keep poking at it until all the poison drains from the wound and all I have is a scar. I know I need to get a job. I know I should be doing a billion other things. Knowing something and making it happen are often different things. Some days I don’t have the bravery to face the immensity of the world. Most days I don’t have the bravery. I will try and start then something else will come up and I just get too discouraged. I try so hard to be positive but some days I just don’t have it in me. Every once in awhile it becomes so much that part of me just wants to not exist for a few minutes.  Bah I am getting way off track.

The point was supposed to be that many people that do this are not the monsters we want to believe they are. The effects are profound. The damage emotional abuse causes is real and painful and scarring, just as scarring as physical abuse. I am not saying that because these abusers are not monsters that what happens isn’t monstrous. I needed to realize this. I needed to come to grips with the fact that I stayed not because I was weak but because I am human. It is a hard balance to walk. I loved him for a good reason and I have to remember that while realizing why I couldn’t stay.

If you do happen to read this, know that part of me will always love you. There is good in you and I believe in that good. My greatest hope for you is that somehow you heal enough so when you are ready, you can be happy and you can have the kind of relationship the best parts of you deserve. Closing that door was the hardest thing I have ever done. I know you have it in you to be an incredible man someday. I just can’t wait for that someday.

 

 
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Little Girl

It happened to her because every adult in her life failed her.

I didn’t really know her. She would come in about once a week with the group home she was in. I do know she was quiet, sweet, smart, and deeply needing affection and approval. I also knew she was 15 and she liked my purple hair.

For some reason she was at the library alone that night. I have no idea why. I think she knew the two guys she started walking around with. One of the boys clearly saw the part of her he could take advantage of and circled in like a shark. I watched it all with mild curiosity. Later when she went out back with the boy one of the other librarians saw her sneak out with him. She came up to the rest of us and made a snarky comment. One of us should have went out to check on her.

I saw the boy come back in and got his friend to leave. I don’t remember thinking anything of it. I saw her come back in a bit later and I remember thinking she looked a bit dazed. Then I saw her crying. I wondered what was wrong with her but I didn’t interfere. She started talking to another boy she knew and cried harder. He started hugging her and taking care of her. I remember being relieved that someone else was doing it. She used the phone and wandered around crying for a bit. I never once stopped to ask her if everything was okay.

She came to us. She told us she needed help because he had raped her. I didn’t get up and give her my chair but when she sat on the ground I saw the blood. I got on the floor with her. I don’t know if it was right or just weird. My co-worker called the police and handled the crowd while I sat in the floor with her.

I don’t know why the blood changed things for me. Before she was some moody little teenager that was probably having some silly boy trouble but after I saw the blood she became a little girl in a lot of pain. I did the only thing I knew to do and held her while she cried. I don’t remember what we talked about but I am sure I told her all the things we tell people in pain.

The woman from the group home came in and looked at her on the floor with me and immediately started pacing while making phone calls. I don’t blame her. I know she was probably had a billion reports to make and balls to start running. So I stayed on the floor with this little girl while she cried.

I got up when the police and ambulance got there. I don’t remember why I got up but I know I yelled at a few younger people who were staring. We should have closed the library that night, then again, there were a lot of things we should have done. Anyway,  when I walked back into the room she was still on the floor with all these men standing around her staring and asking questions. That pissed me off for some reason so I pushed one aside and said “Someone should be on the floor with her.” I crawled back beside her.

As she left I asked her if she was going to be strong and tell them what happened. I told her I was proud of her for being so brave.

I have seen her a few times since that night. She seems to be okay. I want to stop her and ask her a million questions. I want to know how she is really doing. I want her to know how proud of her I am and how sorry I am that it happened to her. I never will say those things to her though. It is that strange distance society places on people. I am afraid of intruding or making her feel awkward. I am afraid that I am that crazy woman that sat on the floor with her the night something happened to her.

It was over a year ago and I still think of her often. I think she would be surprised if she knew how much she changed my life. I am still amazed about how much strength and grace a fifteen year old girl could possess. Maybe one day I will be able to tell her that and that I am damn proud of her.

 
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